The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (10.1896)

An Idyll in Millinery

By Menie Muriel Dowie

I

he actual reason why Liphook was there does not matter

he was there, and he was there for the second time within
a fortnight, and on each occasion, as it happened, he was the only
man in the place—the only man-customer in the place. A pale,
shaven young Jew passed sometimes about the rooms, in the
background.

Liphook could not stand still ; the earliest sign of mental
excitement, this ; if he paused for a moment in front of one of
the two console tables and glanced into the big mirror, it was
only to turn the next second and make a step or two this way
or that upon the spacious-sized, vicious-patterned Axminster
carpet. His eye wandered, but not without a mark of resolution
in its wandering—resolution not to wander persistently in one
direction. First the partings in the curtains which ran before
the windows seemed to attract him, and he glanced into the gay
grove of millinery that blossomed before the hungry eyes of
female passers-by in the street. Sometimes he looked through
the archways that led upon each hand to further salons in which
little groups of women, customers and saleswomen, were collected.

Sometimes